Well, tonight I had more fun getting things working. Grabbed a monster load of source code for DRI drivers out of CVS, watched an X Files episode ("Fire") while the compiler messages went flashing by. Midway through the third act, the compile was finished. I don't even want to know how long that would've taken on Dagobah.

Followed the installation instructions more or less to the letter (well, not really, because I had to adapt them to my situation and preferences). Fired up an X server with the new stuff. It seemed that the easiest way to test it in action would be to pull the q3demo off of Illian (where I had backed it up), install, and fire it up, which I did.

After a couple misfires, and a few more tweaks to the XF86Config file, I had a game of Quake running in 1024x768 under XFree86 4.0.1, using the loaded DRI kernel module, plus AGP. Damn was that thing slick! I thought it was cool before when I had it running under Mandrake with 3.3.6 and the Utal glx libs. With this setup, it's just plain astounding. Even under the demos with action going nuts, with zillions of things flying every which way, the frame rate didn't blink. Gotta love it.

(And I'm getting a leeetle bit better. Maybe one of these days, I'll even be able to beat Major on the Bring It On Level. :) I must sound horribly pathetic to the hardened quake veterans.)

Of course, yesterday I saw and observed this article with interest. My comment about Linux game sales being less than steller: Well they certainly make it hard enough for us consumers to get our hands on them, don't they? Searching store after store, without a single find. How are people supposed buy them if no retail outlets are offering? Come on, Loki! And as for my order from LinuxMall, which was placed a week and a half ago, I got a nice little note the next day saying Quake 3 was on backorder. I have received no further word since then. This is utterly pathetic. No retail outlets. Online orders apparently delayed into infinity. Is it any wonder sales are down?

And in more upbeat news, Potato was just declared stable. Three cheers for Debian! Hip hip, hooray!

And I see it's past 2300. Lovely. So much for that theory I was contemplating at around 1500. You know, the one where ya say to yourself, "I really need to get more sleep tonight than I did last night. I really, really do." But then the evening comes, and there's so much fun stuff to do! A sad quandry, it is. A sad, sad quandry. ;)

Ya know, I've long had this idea (ever since before I started planning Argo's purchase) that I should take my entire cd collection, transfer it onto mp3, and then run something like smartplay for extended periods of time whenever I'm at my computer. All my music, right there, in this gigantic anti-playlist. This idea was one of my reasons for choosing the size of hard drive that I did.

And now, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to refine that idea, and do it with Ogg Vorbis. (In case anyone hadn't noticed, I have been reading Slashdot lately. Tada!) A whole repository of .ogg files. It has a certain appeal, now doesn't it? :)

So I downloaded one of the songs in this intriguing new format, along with the xmms plugin. Installed without a hitch. Sounded nice. (A real comparison would need the same song, encoded from the same source, playing on the same speakers to be able to truly name a preference.) But before I even think about it, there's gonna have to be a command line version of the player. No command line? No scripting. No scripting? No fun. No fun? No point.

Or something.

So now, with all these X server versions, driver modules, libraries, and other garbage strewn all over my hard drive in various places, it's feeling like quite a mess. Much like the physical space in the room around me. Somehow, I'm gonna have to clean in up in such a way that things will still work. Somehow. That's the next challenge.

Then maybe, just maybe, I can get around to configuring my window manager key bindings, and get the rest of my stuff to the point of being at least half usable. Right now, it ain't pretty.

Well, I could put forth a little more food for the content vultures, but I have a serious suspicion that if I don't get rest soon, morning guy is really gonna hate me even more than he did before. So...

Bitscape signs off.